Bill Clinton’s endorsement of former governor Andrew Cuomo, coupled with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s refusal to support Zohran Mamdani, the successful Muslim democratic socialist in the New York City mayoral race, reveals everything we need to know about today’s Democratic Party. Add to that the cowardly Democratic lawmakers who stood with Trump to end the shutdown, and the picture sharpens: this is no longer a party of alleged principles but an echo chamber of timidity, moral vacuity, and political emptiness. The failure of the Democrats to defend Americans from the crushing costs and deepening fragility of health care has become a matter of life and death. Studies published in The American Journal of Public Health and updated by Public Citizen estimate that 44,789 working-age Americans die each year simply because they lack health insurance.

By capitulating on this issue, the Democrats bear blood on their hands, proving once again that their vaunted talk of justice and a better life for working-class people is not only hollow but an act of political and moral violence. What we are witnessing is not mere complacency but complicity, a politics of managed decline masquerading as pragmatism, a surrender to cruelty dressed up as bipartisanship. The Democratic Party’s retreat from the language of moral responsibility is more than a failure of policy; it is a betrayal of conscience, an abdication of the very democratic promise it claims to defend.

Nowhere is the collapse of moral responsibility more evident than in the Democratic Party’s unwavering support for the genocidal war in Gaza. Not only have its leaders aligned themselves with Israel’s war criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also supplied the very weapons that have annihilated more than 70,000 Palestinians, men, women, and children. This is not merely a political failure. It is a moral collapse. The complicity of the Democratic Party is written in blood.

The Democratic Party, stripped of moral conviction and political imagination, has collapsed into a hollow centrism, an empty vessel adrift in a sea of political and moral paralysis. As Trump bulldozes the Constitution and transforms the republicinto a warfare state, Democrats respond with platitudes instead of power. They refuse to call for mass movements, summon people into the streets, call for strikes, and fight to dismantle the machinery of the war economy and the obscene inequality it sustains. They are the soft face of neoliberalism’s ruthless cruelty, servants to the corporate–military–techno complex they claim to restrain.

As Richard Wolff has long argued, both major parties are bound by their allegiance to the financial elite and the billionaire class. Neither dares utter a critical word about capitalism, much less connect it to the crises, social, ecological, and moral, that define our time. This silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.

In their cowardice, they have become collaborators, not opponents, of authoritarianrule. Their politics of accommodation mask a failure of moral will. Rather than ignite collective resistance, they drift in the shallow waters of corporate centrism, where compromise replaces courage and the language of reform masks complicity. What remains is a party drained of purpose, incapable of moral outrage, and deaf to history’s warning. Drowning in their own vapid centrism, they offer no vision, no movement, no dream, only the cold echo of a political corpse.

Chris Hedges reminds us, “Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump is not an aberration but the political expression of a deeper pathology: the long-standing war that neoliberal capitalism has waged against democracy itself. This is gangster capitalism in its purest form: a politics rooted in greed, racial hatred, and the legacy of colonial domination. Its endpoint is an updated version of American fascism.

This system produces staggering inequalities of wealth and power, displaces workers by outsourcing labor to global sweatshops, and sustains itself by weaponizing resentment. It diverts the anger of the dispossessed toward scapegoats, immigrants, Black people, refugees, and anyone who does not fit the profile of the white Christian nationalist ideal. The cruelty is deliberate: fascism thrives on manufactured enemies and the illusion of order through violence.

The Democratic Party cannot face their own complicity in pushing gangster capitalism into its current cruel, authoritarian, zombie-like form. The dominant elements of the party just gave Trump another win in their willingness to end the shutdown without preventing the Trump death machine from eliminating health care for millions. In Europe, the Democratic Party would be viewed as a right-wing organization. Yes, there is Zohran Mamdani and younger, more militant members of the party, but until they break with the false assumption that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, they are doomed to a party that has no answer to redistributing wealth, power, providing universal health care, decent housing for everyone, and a social order in which human needs are prioritized over the criminal class of billionaires. America is a criminogenic state and the traditional mechanisms of checks and balances serve that state. Political culture runs on the model of a merger between the Mafia and zombie politics.

Not even liberals are willing to call American society a fascist state. This is not merely cowardice; it is an act of enabling–the kind of behavior that after 1945 put people on trial for crimes against humanity. We need a new version of the Nuremberg trials and until that happens, violence, state terrorism, and the collapse of conscience will burn down the planet, along with the very idea of democracy.

What is needed now is not another party of compromise but a new movement of conscience, one capable of rekindling moral courage and collective imagination. We need a socialist movement willing to make power visible, to revive dangerous memories, and to forge a politics rooted in critique, solidarity, and hope. Such a movement must speak the unspeakable truth: that capitalism is the breeding ground of fascism, and that democracy can only be rescued by those willing to imagine, organize, and fight for a radically different future.

This is not merely a call for reform but for rebirth, a call to build institutions that nourish life rather than destroy it, to mobilize a mass movement that creates a new language of critique and possibility, embraces anti-capitalist values, and fights for a radical democracy grounded in equality and justice. It requires the courage to challenge the machinery of cruelty, to expose the myths that mask domination, and to reclaim education as the practice of freedom and the lifeblood of civic consciousness.

The urgency of this project cannot be overstated. The struggle for democracy is no longer about repairing a broken system, it is about survival: moral, political, and planetary. Either we breathe life back into the corpse of democracy through collective struggle, or we watch it decay under the rule of the walking dead.

History always teaches that resistance is born in the darkest hours. It is sustained by those who refuse despair, who turn critique into action, and who know that hope is not a sentiment but a discipline. The time has come to choose between complicity and courage, between the living and the dead. To fight for democracy today is to reclaim the very possibility of a humane future.

This first appeared on the LA Progressive.

The post The Democrats: a Modern Day Version of Zombie Politics and the Walking Dead appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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